In 1988 Sculthorpe wrote the orchestral work Kakadu, a year before visiting Australia’s famous national park. But his name was already virtually synonymous with the musical depiction of landscape and indigenous culture. He wrote Nourlangie (a Kakadu rock formation) for the guitarist John Williams following that first visit to the park in 1989. A colourful, evocative work scored for guitar, strings and percussion, it finds an affectionate echo in Richard Charlton’s similarly scored Mosaic, which was inspired by his own visit to the Northern Territory, where he heard Williams perform Nourlangie.

Ross Edwards’s Arafura Dances (the Arafura Sea is to the north-west of Darwin) is another work written for Williams which evokes the Top End; its outer movements are fine examples of Edwards’s ‘Maninya’ dances which appear throughout his oeuvre. The odd man out here is Kalgoorlie-born Philip Bračanin, whose superb neo-classical Guitar Concerto, commissioned by Isolde and Karin Schaupp in 1991, is less programmatic and more abstract in conception.

Schaupp, also a NIDA-trained actress with a strong interest in theatre, is one of Australia’s most technically gifted and empathetic guitarists. These fine performances, in which she is ably accompanied by a variety of Australian orchestras and conductors, like the composers themselves demonstrate an ability not just to describe a landscape in music but to tell its story.